Windows Communication Foundation: Steroids for your Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture (Part II)
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by Tom Fuller
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WCF Service Runtime Behaviors

Part of the evolution of the ASMX stack and part of the unification of all distributed development technologies is a set of service runtime behaviors that is unprecedented. Here are some of the most interesting additions.

1.      Instancing Control: WCF services can control how they are instanced by specifying Singleton, Private Session, Shared Session, and Per Call. Today we really only have the ability to do Per Call instancing in ASMX. This provides a much greater set of capabilities for designing services.

2.      Concurrency: A service will specify whether the concurrency is Single, Multiple, or Reentrant. Of course, this flexibility comes with some pitfalls. You have to understand some of the limitations of the other settings. For example, if you are setting your instancing to per-call, you cant use anything other than single threading.

3.      Throttling: A service is able to control through configuration the number of incoming threads it will accept. This allows runtime control over how many resources are consumed on a host environment.

4.      Error Handling: WCF services have a configuration switch that specifies whether errors should be sent to the client or not. This is something you would use only for problem diagnosis; when used carefully, this could give important details in the event of a failure.

5.      Transactions: Transaction flow is a capability of WCF services. This is dependent on the binding that is chosen, but there is support for transaction flow across services calls.

6.      Security: The security features available to WCF services vary based on your bindings. There is message level security that enables message encryption. There is also transport level security that depends completely on the specified binding. In some cases, Windows security is your only option; in other scenarios WS-Security will apply.

7.      Metadata: WCF services provide the facility to enable or disable metadata publishing as well. Services can specify whether they want to respond to HTTP GET request with an MEX endpoint and/or WSDL.

So How Do These Features Help Me Build Service-Oriented Systems?

The service behaviors listed above do not all map directly to the needs of a service-oriented developer. Although supporting SO development is a key objective for WCF, it is not the only objective. Another goal would seem to be to provide a unified robust set of features that enable distributed development on the Microsoft platform. Many of the features above are giving administrators more control of how a service behaves after deploying to a production environment. It is probably unfair to look at these service features and pass judgment based on how immediately they might be able to facilitate SO development. The root of most of these features is based on the unification of the disparate technology stacks and the implementation of the lessons learned from ASMX, WSE 1, and WSE 2.


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User Comments

Title: out of date article   
Name: Rocky
Date: 2008-02-07 3:40:37 AM
Comment:
Please update the article it is now out of date
Title: Great Work!   
Name: Jani
Date: 2005-11-29 3:23:59 PM
Comment:
Very good article. Clarified a lot of confusions on SOA and WCF.

Keep up the good work.

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